Witch of the Midnight Blade

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  He’d just figured out Del had given up. She wasn’t fighting anymore. And from the look on Nax’s face he was assuming, for some reason, that it was Leif’s fault.

  Leif instinctively looked toward the glow on the horizon, at what should have been “the wider world.” At the place where he should have been able to get his bearings.

  And there it was, right there, oozing around the rubble like the viscous energy wave he’d seen back when Janus tried to open the new ground incursion under the blue stallion statue. The pulsing. The visual rendition of what everyone else “heard.”

  They’d moved halfway around the world. And Daniel wasn’t the only powerful Fate listening.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Del…

  “I’m gonna puke,” I said.

  We were in the remains of the first city hit. The one that got no warning. The one the dragons surprised.

  The city had been flattened. Only piles of concrete and glass rubble remained, and a haze so thick I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and nose. An eerie quiet indicated nothing Earthly survived here. Not a rat or a cat or a person, though I was pretty sure I’d seen a hellhound about the size of a beagle poke its head out from under a fallen piece of concrete not too far away.

  The ruins of one of Earth’s greatest cities had been enclosed inside a thick, acidic, death-smelling fog, and it was being transformed into something decidedly not human.

  A machine-made roar blasted over us. Nax pulled Daniel and me under the concrete overhang. Antonius vanished. Leif pressed his still-gray body against the rubble pile next to the overhang. He swung up his rifle.

  The air above us displaced as something huge and camouflaged moved over. A blast of hot air followed.

  Vivicus said thirty-eight million humans died when the dragons attacked. All the animals, too. All the kids and little old ladies. All the bustle and the hustle and the neon. All the art and the engineering. The civilization.

  I’d always wanted to travel. I grew up in Denver, Colorado, dead center in the middle of the United States. The most non-Denver places I’d ever visited were the tribal lands with my dad when he’d go out to Montana or South Dakota on business.

  Now I was standing under a broken piece of the world I never knew existed. A chunk of concrete that had probably killed a kid my age. A young woman who worked hard, went to school, and lived her life. A woman who had been as insulated from Denver as I had been from Tokyo.

  We would never meet. We would never strike up a conversation and learn about each other’s lives. We would never offer a bed when the other visited. Never share a meal.

  Maybe that was why I’d given Janus the sword. Maybe somewhere in the back of my head, I’d realized he was the only hope we had of altering the timelines so that I had a chance to change my insular ways.

  Maybe I’d handed it over because of regret.

  And here I had felt some affinity to that dragon kid.

  “No, you are not going to puke, Philadelphia Parrish,” Daniel whispered.

  The dragon ship above us moved on by. I exhaled, finally, after realizing I was holding my breath.

  I leaned my butt against the side of the overhang and pressed my hands into my knees. The queasiness fluttered through my gut and mixed with the remaining shadow-sting of the new-space electrical ants. The rolling and tumbling in Maria’s cage had done a number on my ears, too. My equilibrium was still messed up.

  Maybe I should ask if anyone else had seen what I’d seen in Maria’s prison. If I was the only one who’d seen the boy or been held down by the real commander of the Dragonslayer. Because I was pretty sure that’s who I’d met.

  Or if anyone else had talked to the Alt-‘slayer. They hadn’t. They were all the wrong kind of confused to have heard the ship—the ships.

  But hey, Janus had a solid plan.

  “I’m done,” I said. I’d crested comprehension and descended into panic a long time ago.

  Daniel wrapped his arms around his chest but stopped and dropped them back to his sides again as if he’d realized showing vulnerability was a detriment to his manly future-seer arrogance.

  “Mr. Ghost Fate here used me as bait to catch his body’s brothers. Isn’t that right, Daniel? Then his all-seeing future-seer conveniently forgot to warn me that I was going to get an enthralling.” I stood up. “So here we are.”

  Daniel moved to step into my space but must have realized I’d hit him if he touched me. “You’re sick of being used?” he said. “We’re all being used. Nice that you finally figured it out.”

  “Okay, now, let’s—” Nax began. I held out my hand so he’d be quiet.

  “Tell me the truth,” I said to Daniel. I was so tired I could barely stand up. “Just this once. Be the immortal who clearly explains the plan.”

  Daniel glanced out at Leif and Antonius. “We have work,” he said as if it was some random-ass job. Like he was some low-paid aide at an oldster warehouse. Like he, too, was just another cog in the universe machine.

  Leif gripped the edge of the concrete over our heads and leaned into our shadows. “The jump,” he said to Daniel.

  At least he didn’t tell me to be quiet until he figured out what to do, or to get a grip, or to just shut up.

  “This is our timeline,” Daniel said.

  Nax’s eyebrow arched. The thought of moving timelines hadn’t occurred to him.

  Or me.

  “I think…” Daniel exhaled. “I think you need an incursion—and the correct targeting—to jump timelines the way you did.”

  Leif stared out at the rubble pile for longer than I expected, as if watching more ghosts. Then he stretched his neck and placed his glove first on Daniel’s forehead. “You’re slightly hypothermic.” He stepped back. “Unshielded exposure to new-space could cause all sorts of problems.”

  He glanced at me.

  Then he placed his glove on Nax. “The slight hypothermia seems to be doing you some good.”

  Nax flexed his shoulders. “Best not use my abilities. Just in case.”

  I patted his arm again. “Don’t get yourself killed, okay? We’re going home.” I was going home. The least I could do was take Nax with me.

  Leif seemed to finally be accepting that I was done with all their manipulations and their bullshit. Antonius, though, continued to stomp around like a freaked-out, frightened little boy.

  Daniel stared with his unnerving cloudy eyes as Antonius walked over. “Your timeline is not the only one that interfered,” he said.

  Antonius opened his hood. “I think she’s correct.”

  Daniel visibly tensed when Antonius said she.

  “Don’t be a dick,” Nax said before I could call Antonius on his bluster.

  Antonius’s lip twitched.

  Nax might be the Lesser of the Emperors, but he wasn’t about to let a mere Seraphim stare him down. Antonius flicked his hood closed again.

  “What happened?” Nax asked, more to Daniel than to Leif or Antonius. “That wasn’t an incursion.”

  “My suit called it a Trinzi-Bower cage,” Leif said. He was staring at the rubble pile again and did a slight step to the side as if allowing a ghost to pass.

  Whatever, I thought. Maybe he was seeing Maria, though I figured I’d see her, too. She wasn’t here, so she’d made it home. She had to have made it home. I was going to keep telling myself that. Or maybe the jump had made both Leif and me crazy.

  None of which mattered now.

  Antonius looked up. “I heard that, too.”

  “I take it neither of you are familiar with that term?” Nax said.

  Antonius shook his head.

  “So Maria’s prison isn’t your tech?” Nax asked.

  Leif nodded.

  “Then it’s proof that Daniel’s right. Your timeline isn’t the only one applying pressure here.”

  The last thing we needed was interference from unknown tech—though it was familiar to Stab and the ring. The humans didn’t recognize what was happening, bu
t that damned sword had full control of the situation.

  Should I tell them about the Alt-‘slayer? Because this “new” tech was probably tied to the timey-wimey ways of the universe. Or not. Maria had been in that cage for a hundred years, at least.

  Or maybe our timeline was some sort of convergence point. Maybe we were the whirlpool around which all the oddballs in all the timelines found themselves swirling. Maria. Leif and the Seraphim. Random versions of Marko-Janus-uber-Fate. Stab. All the sister-versions of our sky friend, as Antonius called the ship. Even Ismene.

  They were all doing their own version of time instead of listening to each other and working together. Where did that leave us? With Janus’s solid-ass plan to destroy my home timeline.

  As long as it left me alone, I didn’t care what they all did. None of it mattered.

  “I think I may have met the Bower in question,” Daniel said. “The name Trinzi means nothing.” He closed his dead eyes. “Not in the present or the future.”

  “Or you’re lying and you know exactly what’s happening,” Antonius said.

  “Is this going to be a problem?” Leif snapped. “Because if it is, it’s a problem that needs to wait its turn.”

  Antonius pulled one of the discs they used on the hellhounds off his shoulder. “Be ready.” He tossed it to Leif.

  Nax checked his rifle. “Either of you able to make contact with your buddies in Portland?” He looked Daniel up and down. “Or can you send out one of your Fate beacons to your brother?”

  Daniel shivered again. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Do the opposite of stitching,” Nax said.

  Daniel tossed Nax a look that even he should be able to read as Shut up, you condescending prick.

  Leif chuckled. Antonius looked shocked as if this was the first time in all of this that he truly understood who was driving that body. But it faded quickly, and he returned to his disbelieving self.

  Leif slapped the disc against his shoulder. His suit pulsed, then settled into a more powered-up version of itself. He wasn’t camouflaging, but the suit’s tiny hexagonal plates appeared ready to do their jobs.

  “I’m at thirty-three percent,” he said.

  Antonius nodded and his suit pulsed.

  “What did Janus say?” Leif asked.

  “That this timeline doesn’t matter,” I said. “That he knew using Maria’s prison wouldn’t set off whatever awfulness the dead AI up there has in place with incursions.” I pointed at the sky. “He’s going to set it off anyway. When he’s finished.” Solid.

  “We need to get somewhere clear,” Antonius said. “If the U.S. Navy is off the coast, we can call for an extraction.” He pointed in the direction I assumed was the ocean. “Or the Russians.”

  “Yes.” I dusted off my jacket. “We go toward the ocean.” I pushed past Leif. Maybe the Navy could get me home fast enough for me to say goodbye to my little brothers before this version of the world fully ended. “Call for help.”

  “We cannot let this timeline’s dragons get those suits,” Leif said.

  Leif had gone with Janus to watch over Nax. He’d fought off Janus once already to stop the Final Protocols. The only reason he and Antonius were here was to put an end to all this in the first place. He wasn’t going to stop. He had significant sunk costs here.

  It didn’t matter. Janus had won.

  “Maybe we should let them,” Antonius said. At least he understood.

  Daniel sucked in his breath. “No.”

  Nax looked between Daniel and the two Seraphim. “Maybe we should,” he said.

  “Doesn’t matter what we want,” I said to Leif. “He’s got Stab. He’s going to get what he needs to start the war.”

  “He’s going to open a ground incursion so he can take Stab, Vick, and all three of his Progenitor seers to the Dragonslayer.” Leif pointed at the sky. “That’s what he means by ‘when he’s finished.’ He’s going to open his escape route at the spike. He doesn’t care what that will do to this timeline as long as he thinks he can activate the ship and pay the dragon homeworld a visit.”

  “They can’t,” Daniel said. “He can’t.”

  “We know,” Leif said. “He doesn’t have the correct crew for the Final Protocols.” He was staring at the glow on the horizon again. “That won’t stop him.

  “No, no,” Daniel said. “Well, yes, but no. He’ll make things worse.”

  Antonius rubbed his face, but thankfully refrained from calling Daniel a liar again.

  “Del, show them the video,” Daniel said. “The EMP fried the phone, but maybe you can recover the video.”

  Daniel wanted to share our friendly chat with the dragon. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. We were all genocidal, humans and dragons. All that mattered was whose trigger finger twitched the fastest.

  I pulled out the phone anyway.

  Leif frowned at me as he took the device. He hit the on button, but it didn’t power up. “Run diagnostics,” he said, and slapped it against the inside of his arm. “My suit’s rerouting around the damage.” The phone came to life.

  “The last video taken,” Daniel said.

  Leif expanded the playback to the flat patch over his upper right chest, in the same place as the insignia had appeared on Antonius.

  The image of the dragon appeared. “It came to investigate the dead hellhound,” I said.

  “When?” Antonius asked.

  Humans start war, signed the dragon.

  “It’s signing?” Nax said. “How the hell did it learn American Sign Language?”

  “You’re going to want to enhance the next part,” Daniel said.

  Leif stopped the video just as the dragon began its projection. He moved his hand on his forearm to zoom in. The image wasn’t clear, so he flicked through several filters. They turned on and off, then on again, until the image in the projection was clearer than it would have been with any tech humans had now.

  A man turned toward the camera and fired his weapon.

  “That’s…” Nax pointed instead of finishing his sentence. “Is that who I think it is?”

  Leif slapped his arm. The video vanished. “No more of this,” he said. “No more images from random timelines. No more dancing with what-ifs and maybe-nots.”

  “Without… him…,” Daniel meant the man in the video. He inhaled and settled himself. “I don’t know if it’s the spike or the uncertainty here that’s not allowing me to see for sure, but my gut is telling me that without the safety net of the Progenitors, Janus will make things worse in this timeline and the next. For everyone. Us and the dragons. That simply ‘letting him’ is not the answer.”

  I wondered about convergence points again. About too much debris in the whirlpool and us all getting hit in the head by flying bits of random.

  Leif was not supposed to be here. Janus had referred to him as the Impossible Son. And Maria? Why the hell would the long-dead daughter of a Tsar be important? And then there were the ghosts and the alt-voices.

  All the timelines wanted input into this one. It was as if the universe was tossing a lot of seeds into this soil and praying a few of them would cross-pollinate into something that could stand against the end.

  Janus’s plan of burning and salting the land wouldn’t do what needed doing.

  Leif stared out at nothing. Then he sighed and scrolled through the phone’s contacts. “Everyone has the same numbers here that they had in our timeline,” he said offhandedly.

  The newly-revived phone flickered. He must have downloaded the full contact list before trading the phone to Daniel for the duffle.

  The ground shook. The haze shook as well, and the thick dust swirling around our concrete perch pushed away from us as if slapped. A wave of heat rolled by and the sky suddenly turned yellow. Leif and Antonius both spread their arms protectively.

  An earthquake. A small, fast one, but still a quake.

  “I won’t give up on this timeline,” Leif said. “There’s hope here.” He looke
d at me. “We need to fight.”

  Nax swung his rifle onto his shoulder and extended his hand to Daniel. “I was Emperor of Rome for three months. I came in on Nerva’s heels.” He exhaled slowly. “But I was Marcus Aurelius’s choice, not his shithead son, Commodus.”

  Daniel took his hand. He continued to stand closer to Nax than I expected, as if he trusted neither Leif nor Antonius.

  “I had one view of how to run things. The Praetorian Guard had another. The Senate, yet another. Lots of competing needs and priorities. Lots of corruption. Lots of violence and death. Factions, basically. Some of them wanted the same thing. Some hid their desires so well I had no idea what they wanted or why. Some wanted to watch Rome burn.”

  Daniel pulled his t-shirt’s collar higher over his mouth and nose.

  “The key was not to think about the tools each faction brought to the fight, but to think of the factions as the tools,” Nax said.

  Daniel walked to Leif and patted the duffle, looked up with those dead-yet-knowing eyes, then shook his head.

  Leif slapped his knives onto his suit and strapped on his sidearm. “Uncle Daniel wants me to listen and to learn,” he said.

  Daniel squeezed his elbow and nodded almost imperceptibly, as if to affirm his choice to not involve this world’s Dracae.

  “So,” Nax said, “this isn’t about which timeline sent back who and what. It’s about what pieces on the board we’ve been granted to fix ours.”

  Antonius shrugged. “How’d that philosophy work for you back in the day?”

  Nax walked past him to stay near Daniel. “It got me killed.” He grinned and pointed at Daniel. “By this one’s Palatini grandfather.”

  Daniel patted Nax’s elbow. “Yet here we are, working together.”

  Nax saluted. “So endeth the lesson.” He held out his hand to me. “Come.”

  Leif pulled the last of his weapons from the duffle. He rolled another disc around in his hand before attaching it to his shoulder. “We have four,” he said to Antonius.

  “Enough to get their attention,” Antonius answered.

  I zipped up the empty duffle and threw it over my shoulder. “Give me a knife,” I said. “In case I find some canned food.”